“Is this love?” she kept asking.
She’d decided it had little to do with sex. The sex was wonderful, he was the most efficient and considerate of lovers, yet her emotions rose above the physical snarls of their lovemaking in the way the soul—as the nuns at St. Jude’s had insisted—transcended the body after death.
During the act itself she could not, did not want to “think” at all. But in the moments before their passion gathered force and especially during the long moony afterglow as they traced fingertip lines along an arm or rib cage, or down a still trembling, heated thigh, her awareness hovered above his carved rosewood four-poster, an antique inherited from his grandmother, gazing down upon them with the questions Is it? Could it be? After so many years? When she had resigned herself even before Graham, even before she and her mother had moved to Philadelphia, to the role of Good Daughter, if not the cliché of Good Daughter as Dried-up Catholic Spinster, rosary beads melding to her chilled bony fingers? Those questions and more, so many more, she could scarcely acknowledge, much less answer.
A few mornings after they’d met at Pace’s party, he had telephoned, the pleasantly stilted British accent recognizable at once, though not the lowered, chastened voice.
“Abby, can you forgive me?”
It was ten-thirty in the morning; Thom had left for work an hour before; she was alone in the condo, feeling unmoored and disconsolate, no longer quite sure what she was doing in Atlanta. She hadn’t known how to answer Philip’s question. He had humiliated her, yes, but she considered that her own fault. She’d been credulous, naive. She’d been a little drunk. Why should she have trusted an impossibly handsome stranger dressed in black, a man who had flattered her absurdly? Lying sleepless that night she had punished herself with masochistic notions: a straight man at a gay party, what options did he have? At another party, one populated with beautiful, laughing women, he’d never have glanced her way. She’d been a moment’s whim, a way of passing the time. She’d been presentable, but not beautiful. She hadn’t been laughing.
“Of course,” she breathed into the phone, aware that her heart was racing. “Of course, but where did you go…?”
His tone changed, his vast relief audible in his abrupt exhalation of breath and sudden laugh. She heard herself laugh, too, as though listening to some other woman.
Together for several hours each afternoon, they talked with the harassed urgency of lovers from whom everything is about to be snatched away. They went everywhere, the Botanical Gardens and the High Museum and the symphony, to Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza and the Galleria where they didn’t “shop,” exactly, but simply wandered through the vast open spaces thronged with holiday crowds. Holding hands. Letting the window displays and the horde of shoppers blur to a brightly hued insignificance. They seldom released their attention, even their vision, past one another. They walked and talked in a sphere of imperturbable quiet where they focused on each other’s words and, as though some invisible glass shield had encircled them, stayed deaf to everything else.
“I can’t understand what you’re telling me,” he said, frowning, as they sat in a little coffee shop near the museum. “How can you not have boyfriends back home? Surely they must queue up outside your door.”
She laughed a girlish, disbelieving laugh, the one she had not used since high school. Something about his gentle British puzzlement, the quizzical frowns he was always giving her, amused her, for matinee-idol handsome as he was, nonetheless he seemed uncertain, stymied by his boyish, romantic notions. Such as the foolish idea that she outranked him in physical beauty, which had become almost a refrain. He talked constantly of her skin, her hair; he noticed the molding of her ears, her throat, her collarbone; when they were alone, he bent to kiss each item in his catalogue of marvels, and it was her wisdom at such moments to fall silent and no longer feel tempted to laugh but instead to allow this elegant, rather eccentric man to feel whatever he wanted to feel, give what he wanted to give.
In public she ridiculed him, gently. “Yes, each man takes a ticket,” she said. “We ask them to please not clog the sidewalks.”
“No, I’m serious,” he said, fixing her with his intent, black-eyed stare. His eyes were his most striking feature: thickly lashed, so dark as to seem all pupil. At such times, he refused to laugh. After a moment she would grow uncomfortable and change the subject.
All the while, she clung fast to her sense of irony: an alternate vision of herself as Miss Abigail Sadler the veteran schoolmarm presided over their clandestine meetings, their hushed conversations, even their frantic lovemaking in that elaborately carved bed in his oversized house in Druid Hills. A month from now, she supposed, her soul would reenter Miss Sadler’s body and recall this affair with the same sense of inconsequence and wry disbelief one felt after watching an intensely romantic film. All that passion, all those emotions, had happened to someone else.
Even as she lay next to Philip caressing his sleek, well-muscled thigh, her fingers tracing the etched lines along his flat stomach and the firm curve of his breastbone, she would allow Miss Sadler a little smirk at such frank enjoyment of this man’s body, his physical near-perfection. Philip’s skin—olive-pale and unblemished, smoother and silkier than her own yet firm to the touch, undeniably male in its layered girding of muscle—brought a literal itch to the ends of her fingers, each caress inspiring another as she explored his body in a way she’d never dreamed of touching a man before. He would lie still for these appreciative caresses, his eyes closed, an artwork passively accepting the admirer’s tribute, but gradually his uncircumcised penis (a novelty she found pleasing: very pleasing) stiffened as her caresses grew bolder, franker, and at some point he would seize her hand abruptly and bring it to his lips, the signal that their lovemaking would begin in earnest. He kept his eyes closed, the lids just perceptibly fluttering, yet through all this Abby allowed Miss Sadler to hover somewhere above them, an eyebrow quirked in condescending bemusement, her ghostly, faintly mocking laughter filling the room. Abby’s enjoyment of their passion was oddly enhanced by this flouting of Miss Sadler’s arch disapproval, and by the thought of the ancient nuns from grade school who now lay smirking in their graves. She could not relinquish this ironic vision of their affair, keeping it clearly focused in her mind’s eye even as her body surrendered to the sweat and toil of a passion she’d never believed might be hers.
During the weeks between their first meeting and Christmas, they met every few days for lunch at one of the restaurants Philip favored: settling into a darkened booth at the rear of Houston’s, where he would reach across the table to stroke her hand, sometimes gently, sometimes a bit harder than she liked; or at small, out-of-the-way places in Brookhaven or Decatur, restaurants Abby had never visited before. One day she’d said, with a thoughtless laugh, “My brother and his friends wouldn’t be caught dead in here” (they were in a seafood place, a chain restaurant whose menu featured special meals for children), and though Philip gave a tic-like smile he was clearly hurt.
“Sorry if you don’t like it,” he said, snapping open his menu.
This time it was Abby who reached across the table; she gave his hand a brief squeeze.
“No, I do like it,” she said, truthfully. “It’s just that some of Thorn’s friends—like Connie, for instance—”
“Oh, of course,” Philip said shortly, “this place doesn’t have a bar.”
He’d given Abby a quick amused glance over his menu, and they broke into laughter.
She’d learned soon enough to avoid mentioning Thom and his friends, since her lover seemed jealous over the time Abby spent with them. One Saturday she’d declined to see Philip because Thom had asked her to lunch with Pace, who had a new boyfriend he wanted Abby and Thom to meet. There had been a long pause over the phone line. Then Philip released his breath, an exasperated sigh.
“Well, blood is thicker, etcetera,” he said. She waited but he said nothing more.
“How about Monday? At lunchtime?” she had asked, troubled by his sudden change of mood.
“I hope so,” Philip said. And hung up.
Nor did Philip want anyone, including her brother, to know that he and Abby had started…dating, was that the correct term? For the first few days, Abby herself had enjoyed the secret, not quite examining her own motive in sneaking off to meet Philip, even when this involved blatantly lying to Thom. Somehow she shared Philip’s inclination, at least for now, to keep their relationship to themselves. Their passion was so raw, so new; it was purely theirs. A few days ago she couldn’t have imagined lying so profusely to her brother, the one person she’d grown up trusting more than any other. Of course, she hadn’t really phoned Amber or her other high school friends. She marveled at her own daring, putting forth such a preposterous idea. What if Thom should run into Amber, by chance? How would Abby explain the lie to him? She couldn’t quite explain it to herself.
Inevitably, though, she tried. It was her job, explaining things, and not only in the classroom. Growing up, Abby had been the conduit between her brother and their parents, especially Lucille, serving habitually as the smoother of ruffled feathers, bearer of messages, interpreter and apologist. She hadn’t minded serving as peacemaker, really, for some quality of hers reassured other people (“Your company is so soothing,” Graham had told her, perhaps the only thing he’d said that had genuinely touched her) and somehow calmed their fears, softened their emotional rough edges. Back at school, lonely or bewildered students would sidle into Miss Sadler’s office for tearful conferences about family problems, romantic unhappiness, various other teenage miseries. Among her colleagues Abby was known as one who refused to play politics or be drawn into factions, treating her friends and people she disliked with equal tact and fair-mindedness. And she told herself she didn’t mind. In the argot of the times, she liked herself. She reflected that against the odds, she had grown up more or less successfully, and there was satisfaction in that.
Only at home with her mother had she come to chafe inside her role as Miss Sadler, the levelheaded schoolmarm whose ethics were as impeccable as the high-necked white blouses she often wore to teach her classes. She had grown tired of gently correcting the exaggerated stories that her mother, for no particular reason, conveyed to other people—especially family members to whom Abby found herself speaking often on the phone, putting out little fires her mother had started. Even when she and her mother were alone, she served as Lucille’s buffer of common sense, her reality principle, her foil. Not long before Abby sent him packing, poor Graham Northwood had commented on how honest and straightforward she was, and how much that attracted him. He’d encountered a number of “flighty” girls in the past, he’d said somberly, unaware that while the stolid Abigail Sadler sat there listening sympathetically another woman, the Abby he’d never known, had already taken flight.
So she shouldn’t have been surprised at the pleasurable abandon with which she hurried off, these past few days, in her rented bright-red Altima, which she drove much faster than Miss Sadler drove the clunky, dented Buick she’d bought straight off a used car lot in South Philly. Impulsively, she’d rented the car one day, asking Philip to drop her at the rental agency instead of taking her home. She’d grown tired of depending on other people—her brother, her lover—to get around town. Thom had been appalled when she rented the car, insisting it was a needless expense, he’d take her anywhere, anytime, but she’d laughed at him. “We aren’t an old married couple, you know,” she said. This newly discovered kernel of stubbornness, the need to preserve her own secrets, prevailed over her conscience and common sense, the twin beacons which, like dependable headlights, had guided Abby’s course through her adult life.
Perhaps there was something deeper than mere stubbornness. One day, driving down Ponce de Leon Avenue toward one of her lunches with Philip, swift and easy as a serpent’s whisper a single word glided into her hearing. Payback. She’d allowed herself no particular resentment toward her brother during their estrangement yet at once she felt a shimmer of assent even as Miss Sadler dismissed the notion with a curt shake of her head. But yes. Payback. Her palms sweating, Abby stopped for a red light at Highland Avenue, peering around at the other cars with the furtive quickness of a criminal who feared she might be recognized. No one glanced her way. She sat flexing her fingers on the wheel until she heard a horn’s toot and, imagining Thorn’s grinning face, glanced fearfully into the rearview mirror. Of course, the driver was a stranger, his impatient hand raised sideways. The light had flashed green.
Each day she sped along in her new-smelling red car, her pulse racing as she followed her lover’s carefully dictated directions to this or that restaurant. Instinctively, she refused to come directly to his house, just as she’d ignored his complaint that he should pick her up, that she needn’t drive at all. She liked the feeling of autonomy and daring, hurrying to meet her lover. She slid into her seat across from him with the awareness that no one on earth knew where she was at that moment, or with whom. She kept telling herself that she would tell Thom, in a few days; she expected a fair amount of ribbing but she hoped he would approve. He and Philip were friendly acquaintances, after all, weren’t they? There was no logical reason not to tell him. What disturbed her was Philip’s suspicion, his jealousy; and the impression he gave, once or twice, that he could read her thoughts.
“You haven’t told anyone, have you?” he said in a level, grim voice.
On that day, they’d bought a deli lunch and were sitting in the open-air courtyard at Ansley Mall. After a cool, cloudy morning the day had turned brilliantly sunny, almost unpleasantly warm for mid-December. It had been Abby’s idea to meet here, and it had taken some persuading. At first, she hadn’t recognized her lover where he’d been sitting by himself with a cup of Caribou’s coffee, pawing through a newspaper. Whereas normally Philip favored dark, dressy clothes—shirts of black silk or thick cotton, perfectly creased dark slacks, an expensive-looking charcoal overcoat that might have been cashmere—today he’d surprised her by wearing sneakers and blue jeans, and a rumpled white oxford-cloth shirt under a nylon windbreaker. Seeing him, Abby had thought immediately they were clothes her brother might wear, making Philip look younger than his age; he might have passed for a college student.
Thom had said he’d be showing houses to some out-of-town clients all day in the Gwinnett County suburbs, but what if he should appear unexpectedly, hurrying down the sidewalk in his long, loping strides? The Ansley area was his stomping ground, after all; she’d felt a bit reckless, insisting that Philip meet her here. After they’d bought their food and found a table, Philip rushed through the meal, keeping his head lowered, muttering that he felt “on display” among the ceaseless stream of shoppers out strolling in this unseasonable weather. When she put down her half-eaten sandwich and said wearily, “All right, then, let’s go,” he stood at once. They dropped their leftovers in a trash barrel and joined the other shoppers crisscrossing the sunlit mall.
That’s when he’d asked his question, apropos of nothing. And it was true: she’d been thinking exactly that.
“Have you?” Philip repeated. “Have you told anyone?”
“No,” she said slowly, deliberately not glancing at Philip. She didn’t want to see the expression on his face, that bereft unhappy look. Whenever Philip became jealous or momentarily displeased, his eyes would narrow, retreating beneath the unbroken dark line of his brow. His lips tightened, stubbornly; the handsome olive gloss of his skin vanished, mirage-like, leaving his face a mottled, ashen gray. “No, but in fact I was planning… I was thinking of having you over, next week. Thom is planning a get-together on Christmas Eve, and I thought—”
“As I mentioned before, I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Philip said shortly. He spat the words out one side of his mouth. His gait had quickened so that Abby struggled to keep up with him. Though they’d been headed toward Pier One—she needed to get something to send her Aunt Millicent—Philip passed by the entrance and headed for the parking lot.
He paused at the curb. “Maybe you could shop for your aunt later—would you mind?”
“No, of course not.” She’d assumed that when they got into Philip’s black Jaguar they’d return to his house, his upstairs bedroom with its tall evergreen-shaded windows—so far, that was how they concluded each of their afternoons together. Each day, she relished the muted excitement of their drive back to that old, ramshackle house on Clifton Road. She loved the twists and turns along Clifton—a classic example of Atlanta’s nonsensical street patterns—almost as if the road, as they snaked along, mimicked her unpredictable, swiftly changing emotions since the night she met Philip. But now she’d annoyed him and she imagined, for the first time, how bereft she might feel if her lover, angry and disgusted, decided not to drive her there. That would mean their intense but peculiar affair was over. Her pulse raced, thinking this. Some wayward, unnamed emotion caught in her throat, fluttering.
She said: “I don’t have to tell him right now. If you’d rather I didn’t.”
They’d reached the car, and instead of getting inside Philip leaned against the driver’s door, pulling her close. He bent down, nuzzled one side of her face.
“I want everything to be just ours, at least for a while,” he whispered. “Let’s keep it this way another week or two, all right? Until after the holidays, maybe. Then we can—” He’d paused, perhaps remembering that Abby would return to Philadelphia just after New Year’s. “But not now,” he said.
Her answer was simple: “All right. That’s fine.”
She told herself they’d been thinking along parallel lines, and that she might feel jealous in his position. If he had a sister, for instance, with whom he lived and to whom he seemed close, confiding, she’d worry that the sister might judge her—might find her not good enough, as Abby supposed she might consider Thorn’s new friend Chip, once she met him, not good enough for her irreplaceable Thom.
Yes, she understood her lover’s need for privacy, his near paranoia; she told herself she understood.
So they got into the car and returned to Philip’s where he made love to her with a silent, almost grim efficiency, to which her body responded helplessly, wave after wave of shuddering pleasure, a new one beginning even before the previous one had ended. His skill astonished her: there was none of the sweaty groping she’d endured with the handful of men she’d dated in her twenties, or more recently with Graham Northwood, who fumbled his way through elaborate precautions (in addition to donning two condoms, made of two different materials, he daubed himself with various gels and lubricants, which had the benefit at least of masking her own dryness) before venturing into their three or four minutes of actual intercourse, which often ended with a husky-voiced “Oof—sorry, I couldn’t hold back” muttered into her hair.
Philip was practiced and confident and graceful. She scarcely noticed when his hand slipped away quietly to extract the tiny packet from the top drawer of his bedside table, then with the same hand—distracting her with the other—unwrapping and donning the condom and entering her in one seamless, luxurious shifting of their limbs. After just a few of his deft slow lunges, she was coming the first time, her bent legs tensed with expectation against his smoothly muscled hips. He whispered something into her hair, he released his warm breath in another of his deep lovely moans against her throat, and already another hot shuddering wave had formed as the core of her being opened to him, halved by him, welcoming his quicker, faster lunges as he, too, neared climax, and by the time he came she was there again, for the third time—or was it the fifth. Afterward he lay quiet, as always, not simply rolling off like other men she had known but lingering with his parted lips against her breast that was flushed and a little sore from the friction of his skin against hers. He said nothing for several long minutes but kept his cheek pressed along her pale, cooling flesh. Then they rose silently and dressed, interrupting the procedure every few moments for a brief, wordless hug as he pulled her against him, decisively, then released her. In her dazed abandon she finished dressing, and he delivered her back to her car, and she drove home in her usual erotic befuddlement, aware that she’d angered him earlier that afternoon, a tiny lifetime ago, but not quite certain what the problem had been—or not quite caring.
It occurred to Abby that despite her few earlier affairs and her several months of dry, antiseptic couplings with Graham Northwood, she’d remained a virgin until she met Philip. The question kept pestering her awareness: Is this love? And one day she understood, suddenly but without regret, that Miss Sadler had abandoned her watch from that cleared-out mental space Abby had preserved so carefully in the first days of their affair. Abigail Sadler with her high-necked blouse and her arched, ironic brow—she was gone.
“Abby, can you forgive me?” Philip had asked, that first time he’d phoned Abby.
They’d been giddy, almost childlike with relief; with an electric sense of anticipation, excitement.
“Of course, but where did you go…?”
Of course, as she recollected later, the question had gone unanswered.
Every few days Abby called her mother, once or twice with her face still flushed from the passion, or was it the shame, of her hours with Philip. She sat on the side of Thorn’s bed, which was always neatly made (just for her?—in high school, he hadn’t been particularly tidy) and let her eyes roam across the now-familiar objects in her brother’s room. The TV stand in one corner, with its stacks of videotapes on a lower shelf. The cherry-wood dresser with its jewelry box of jade-colored stone (a long-ago gift from Lucille) and a vase of tiny purple dried flowers. There were few personal touches: some childhood photos on his bureau along with a framed snapshot of grinning, raffishly handsome Carter; Abby’s own framed photo on the night table, at which she cast only the briefest glance.
“Have you changed your mind about coming home for Christmas?” her mother asked. The question had become a refrain, beginning each of their conversations.
“Mom, I don’t think so. You know that friend of Thorn’s we mentioned, the one who was ill? Thorn’s best friend, actually. He died a few days ago, and I don’t think Thom is in the mood for a trip right now.”
“His best…friend?” her mother said, awkwardly.
“Yes, a friend,” Abby said, wishing she hadn’t mentioned Carter. This wasn’t the time to start explicating Thorn’s relationships for their mother. “He lived here in the same complex. They’ve been buddies for years.”
“Oh, buddies,” Lucille said, relieved. “Goodness. Tell him I’m sorry to hear it—I mean, don’t tell him I said to tell him, it’s just that I am sorry to hear it, so if you want to—I’m just telling you that I’m sorry, but if you—”
Her mother broke off, perplexed.
“But I wondered, Mom, would you mind sending me some things?” She read off the mental list she’d composed, thinking it was modest enough: a few pieces of jewelry she missed, some jeans and sweaters. And a few of her summer clothes, she added quickly. Her shorts, her short-sleeve tops.
“But why—”
“I’m sick of doing laundry every couple of days,” Abby laughed, trying to keep it light. “Please, Mom, will you? And I’m sure the mail has been piling up, just dump all that in the box, too, will you? I gave you Thorn’s address last week, do you still have it?”
A long pause. “Is it that warm down there, honey? That you need your summer things?”
Abby said quickly, “Well, I was thinking—Thom and a couple of his friends are planning a trip, right after Christmas. You know, to get away? I was thinking of joining them.”
“A trip? A trip where?”
“Um, to Florida. Down to Key West, I think.”
“OK, fine,” her mother snapped. “You two have a great time down there sunning yourselves, while I explain everything to your aunt and cousins and try to entertain them by myself. I’ll finish all the shopping, I’ll try to find someone to shovel the snow out of the driveway, I’ll do everything. You kids have fun and send me a postcard, all right?”
To Abby’s great shock, her mother hung up.
Her mother had never hung up on her before. In fact, no one had hung up on her before. Hang up on Abby Sadler? Why would they?
She began to cry. Her insides ached, and she drew one arm across her abdomen as though the pain, so massive and somehow old, even ancient, were merely physical. Ancient, yes, but she’d never allowed herself to feel whatever it was that now welled inside her like a pooling of blood. A hemorrhage. Tears snaked along her cheeks, and she wiped them with two flat palms, and instantly more tears took their place.
That’s when she knew: she would make another phone call, too. It was time.
During the last days before Christmas, she recalled Philip’s insistence they not exchange gifts—for he truly despised the holiday, he repeated, not only for the usual reasons of disliking its near-hysterical commercialism but because he despised Christianity itself. Like her, he’d been brought up Catholic, even more of a minority in his “boxed-up London suburb,” as he called it, than in Atlanta. But the catechism was the same, he said, the nuns and priests were the same, and he’d come away with the same seething resentment toward Catholic orthodoxy and authoritarianism that most intelligent, imaginative people of his generation had felt. He complained that most of his friends went along with the gift giving and party-going even though they’d long ago jettisoned any pretense of belief, but he couldn’t stomach any of it. Checking Abby’s reaction, he looked almost sheepish.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I do want to get you something, a piece of jewelry, maybe…. How about your birthday? When is that?”
“In August,” she’d said, smiling. He looked pensive.
“Perhaps for New Year’s, then. We’ll celebrate the start of our first year together.”
“All right,” she said.
There had been a long pause. He’d given her an earnest pained stare. “But don’t buy me anything, promise?” he said. “I’m uncomfortable with gifts, somehow.”
She was uncomfortable with the request, but she didn’t care to argue. “All right,” she said.
Yet on the morning of the twenty-second, she gave Mitzi and Chloe their bacon-flavored treats (what Thom called their “guilt cookies,” doled out whenever he was about to leave them alone) and slipped out the front door and drove to an expensive jewelry store in Buckhead, Maier & Berkele, where she bought Philip an elegant Rolex watch. It was one of the less expensive Rolexes but nonetheless far more than she’d ever spent on a gift for anyone. More, in fact, than she earned in an entire month. As she emerged from the store with the gift-wrapped box in her hand, her face burned with her own daring, an eerie scalp-tingling excitement she’d never felt before. Within an hour she’d come to her senses: she imagined the moment when she presented the watch to him, saw the clouded look in his eyes and his pale, cemented lips, and knew it was impossible. Somehow she’d had to buy the watch, but she knew better than to give it to Philip. So she put the tiny silver-wrapped package in the glove compartment of the Altima, promising herself she would return it the following day. Was there anything more foolish than giving an unwanted gift? Her face burned and burned.
During that same week, Abby began mentioning to Philip that she might move back to Atlanta. She’d voiced the idea several times, at first tentatively, then with more conviction. She’d always had the fantasy of coming back to Emory, she said, and getting her doctorate. She was tired of teaching Jane Eyre to silly high school girls. She didn’t really care for Philadelphia, she told him—subtly monitoring the look on his face, the light in his eyes—and she probably shouldn’t be living with her mother. Getting away, staying here with Thom for the past few weeks, had made her realize that.
Yet it was such a major decision, of course. Moving to Atlanta. Changing her life.
His gaze would fall to the table, or if they were walking along he would give her hand a brief but desperate squeeze.
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t ask you to do that.”
“I’d been thinking of it, anyway. For the past few months…”
But she was a terrible liar, so she went silent.
She hadn’t told him about the argument with her mother, or that half an hour later, waiting only until she had composed herself, she’d gotten the home number of her principal at West Chester Academy and had called him and resigned. She was sorry to leave between semesters, she told him, rather than completing the year. She’d intended to return, of course, but here in Atlanta there were family problems—and there were personal problems, she added, hoping to forestall any discussion, any awkward questions. She was sorry, sorry, she said quickly, and she hoped he understood. Numbed by her own daring, her breath coming fast, she’d scarcely listened to his reply. Within two minutes the phone call was over. It was done.
“Maybe I should wait,” she told Philip, “and finish out this year, at least.” But then she stopped herself—they were standing on the second-floor balcony of symphony hall, at intermission, gazing at the swarm of well-dressed people down below—for she’d heard the wheedling tone in her voice, and felt herself waiting with a feminine desperation for him to say the magic words, the empowering words. Behavior she despised in other women but here she stood, craven as the worst of them, her limbs seized with an age-old paralysis and longing, her very eyesight glazed and fixed. She wanted to glance at Philip, but as in a bad dream she could not. “Never mind,” she added, hastily. “It’s something I have to decide on my own.”
He let out his breath, relieved. “I’m pleased to hear you say that. It’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Back in their seats, scarcely hearing the music inside their glass shield, she sat awash in shame, her eyes burning.
It had happened too quickly, she supposed, but didn’t it always happen quickly? In life, as in books? She had studied all the books, but they had not prepared her for this.
Each of their outings led to the muted excitement of their drive back to that lovely old house Philip had inherited, he’d told Abby, from his grandmother, the bequest that had brought him to Atlanta almost a decade ago.
“Tell me about her,” Abby had said. “How did she come to live here?”
During their long, languorous afternoons together in Philip’s bedroom, they would make love several times, slowly, luxuriously, and in between their bouts of passion, they would discuss their families, backgrounds, histories, in the seemingly haphazard but selective way in which new lovers come to know one another.
Startled, Philip made an exaggerated gesture of slapping his forehead. He laughed. Yes, he said, he’d forgotten to tell Abby that his father was an American—he’d met his mother while stationed in London during World War II. He’d brought her here to Atlanta shortly after the war (they’d been married in St. Philip’s, in fact, right on Peachtree, and years later, when her son was born, his mother remembered that beautiful church, and thus she found her baby’s name), but after a few years she grew homesick and “fretful,” as Philip’s father later told his son. So the couple had moved back to London, where Everett DeMunn went to work for his father-in-law’s insurance firm, acquitting himself quite well, and where his wife was happy again among her family and friends, which in turn made Everett happy. (“My father was a somewhat uxorious fellow,” Philip told Abby, with an indulgent grimace.) And there they’d lived until that night in December 1989 when both his parents had died in a head-on collision while driving home from a Boxing Day party.
Philip delivered this information in a light, almost jocular tone that left Abby uncertain of how to respond.
She began, in a tentative whisper, “I’m sorry to hear—” but he interrupted with an abrupt, barking laugh.
“I’ve never been sure that it wasn’t my father’s fault,” he said. “He always claimed that after thirty years, he still couldn’t get used to driving on the wrong side of the road.”
Abby stayed silent. Much to her relief, Philip’s defensive, almost hostile smirk had vanished, replaced by a look of dreamy reminiscence. They lay in their usual posture after lovemaking, cuddled in one corner of his overlarge but wonderfully cozy bed, shielded from the chill of this dusky high-ceilinged room by the quilt they’d drawn across their shoulders, both reclining against a bank of thick pillows. Philip began stroking her side absently as he continued with his story.
When his parents died, he’d been only twenty-one, a few months away from graduation at the University of London, and by the time he did finish school his grandmother, too, had died. Since the accident Grandma had been inconsolable, Philip whispered, for Philip’s father had been her only child. Her grief was such that she hadn’t been well enough to fly over for the funeral. Within months her heart had failed. Having no serious ties in England, Philip had decided with a young man’s impulsiveness to sell his parents’ house and move to Atlanta. He’d visited his grandmother several times as a boy, then as a teenager, and had loved Atlanta—the climate, the lovely trees and vegetation, the friendly people. So he’d started work on his MBA at Emory, and here he’d stayed.
“After a while, I saw that almost everyone in Atlanta was from somewhere else, like me,” he said. “Somehow I found that appealing, along with the newness of everything, the energy.”
Abby said nothing. As a native, she saw the city differently.
“So you moved in here—” she said, breaking off. She’d had the sudden thought that this might have been his grandmother’s room; perhaps even this bed, this quilt, had been hers. She decided not to ask.
Philip resumed his story, as though she had not spoken.
Deciding to pursue a business degree had been difficult, he said, for he’d wanted to study acting after graduation. The freelance securities work he did—he’d gestured toward his laptop, on a cluttered table near the door—was just to pay the bills, and frankly bored him silly. In London, he’d planned to attend the Royal Academy, but then, after moving here, he’d gotten involved in Atlanta’s lively theater scene, where he’d found his niche fairly easily in the annual Shakespeare Festival and in the many classic plays mounted by various small theaters around the city. He’d done Shaw, he’d done Wilde. He’d done Moliere and Chekhov and Ibsen. Abby might think it odd, Philip said, his lips creased in a wry smile, but actually he preferred American roles, American playwrights—Tennessee Williams was his favorite, and he loved O’Neill, Miller, Mamet—but despite his ability to mimic a flawless American accent, the local directors seldom cast him in the parts he longed to play. A classic case of typecasting, Philip said, with a rueful laugh.
“They think of me as the local Brit, period. Ironically, the actors who grew up in the South are jealous of me. They’re all dying to play Hamlet, whereas I’ve done all the major roles so many times I’m thoroughly sick of Shakespeare.”
Abby said, “I can understand that. Growing up, I read Austen, Dickens, the Brontës. Even now I read Martin Amis or Anita Brookner—never the Americans. Believe it or not, I’ve never read Gone with the Wind,” Abby said, feeling unaccountably pleased with herself.
“Abigail Sadler,” he said in a severe, censorious tone, propping one arm against his naked hip—the quilt had fallen away, exposing his smooth olive skin that looked so pale, ghostly in the half-light—“and you call yourself a Southerner? Well, let’s see if you recognize this: ‘Sick people form such deep, sincere attachments.’”
The line sounded vaguely familiar, she thought, but it had the ring of the kind of Southern Gothic claptrap she couldn’t abide.
“Sorry, no,” she said. “Who is it?”
Philip gave a mysterious smile, his eyes narrowed. “I’ll never tell.” He moved closer, bringing his mouth to her vaguely parted lips. Her body had tensed, as always, but then relaxed as his hand caressed her side, the outside curve of her thigh. Then the inside curve, gently parting her legs. Already her breath came quickly. For another long while, she said nothing at all.
When Abby arrived home she went to her bedroom dresser and without thinking took the letter from its hiding place among her underclothes. She went into Thorn’s room and dialed the memorized number. Mitzi and Chloe, accustomed to her routine, had rushed ahead, yipping frantically, and had leapt onto the bed, positioning themselves so there was exactly enough room for Abby to sit between them. The manic Chloe flopped eagerly onto her side, and with her long black tail thumping the bed, she whimpered softly until Abby, shaking her head, placed the letter on her lap and rubbed the dog’s soft, plump belly; on Abby’s other side, the more sedate Mitzi contented herself with burying her pointed snout into the crook of Abby’s arm, snuggling into the warm folds of her fluffy pink wool sweater.
“You two girls aren’t spoiled, are you?” Abby asked, as she half-listened to the ringing phone.
After that embarrassing earlier attempt when she’d hung up, panicked, at the sound of Valerie Patten’s voice, Abby had waited several days and then, steeling herself, had tried again. But Valerie had not answered. Nor had the machine picked up. Almost every day she’d tried again, wanting not to interpret the shrilling phone as a sign that something was wrong. If anything had happened to Marty Luttrell, after all, wouldn’t the line have been disconnected? Yet each time her heart skittered as the phone rang ten times, twelve times. Why did this faceless stranger matter so much? Why couldn’t she simply toss the letter away and be done with it? She hadn’t really thought about what she would say if Marty himself answered the phone. Hello, you don’t know me, but I’ve got your suicide note here, and I just wondered if you were still alive. But the next day she’d be back again, dialing the number, not smiling, holding the letter in her trembling hand. The telephone rang and rang.
Now it was the twenty-third of December, almost a month since that airplane flight from Philadelphia, and it seemed unlikely, Abby thought, that Valerie was still in town. Whatever had happened between her and her husband had happened, and by now Valerie had resigned herself to having lost the letter. At the moment Abby decided to give up, to throw the letter away and forget all about Valerie Patten and Marty Luttrell, there was a click on the line, and the sound of a woman’s hoarse, sleepy voice.
“Yes? H-hello?”
“Valerie?” said Abby, startled. “I mean—is this Valerie Patten?”
“Y-yes. What time is it? Who’s this?”
Abby glanced at her bedside clock. “It’s a little after three. I’m sorry if I woke you, but—”
“Three o’clock? Good grief.”
Abby recognized now the good-natured ruefulness of Valerie Patten’s voice.
She apologized again, and explained to Valerie who she was. This took a minute. Laughing, Valerie admitted she’d been fast asleep and was “out of it.” Finally she coughed, cleared her throat, and said, “But sure, hon. I remember you. Flying home to visit your brother, right?”
“That’s right,” Abby said, taking a deep breath.
There was an awkward pause, then Valerie’s offhand, throaty laugh. “How on earth did you find me?”
Another breath, and Abby plunged ahead. “I have your husband’s letter,” she said. “You—you left it behind on the seat, so I picked it up. Remember, you’d been planning to show me the letter, before we ran into that turbulence? Anyway, when I got inside the gate, I looked around but I couldn’t find you.”
“Sure, I remember,” Valerie said, sounding amused. “That’s funny, because I saw you. I saw you talking to your brother and hugging him when I came out of the ladies’ room. Sorry we missed each other, hon. I had no idea you were looking for me. I did wonder what the heck I’d done with Marty’s letter.”
Abby’s heart raced; she felt encouraged by Valerie’s pert, cheerful voice.
She said, timidly, “Then he’s—he’s all right? I hope you don’t mind my asking, but—”
“Oh yes!” Valerie cried. “In fact, we’re thinking of getting back together! I was just intending to stay a few days, you know, but it’s the strangest thing… I realized I still care about the guy, I guess. I’m not getting any younger, either…but my Lord, you don’t want to hear all this.”
“No, it’s fine. Really.” Abby felt relieved, and strangely pleased. “I’ll just—shall I mail the letter back to you? The return address is here on the envelope. Or would you rather I throw it away?”
“God, yes, just toss it,” Valerie laughed. “I sure don’t want it. It would be like saving my gallstones or something.”
Abby laughed, too, though she felt eager to get off the phone. This little drama had a happy ending: Valerie and her husband would live happily ever after. She didn’t need to hear any more.
But Valerie said, “So what is your phone number, Abby? We ought to get together, have lunch or something. It was so sweet of you to call me about that letter! You know, I don’t really have any girlfriends here in town. What about tomorrow? Want to have lunch?”
At the same moment, both Mitzi and Chloe raised their heads and glanced to the doorway; Chloe, still on her side, gave a sharp little yip, her tail skittering lightly atop the bed. Abby had heard nothing, but it must be Thorn’s key in the front door.
“What was that?” Valerie asked. “Does your brother have a dog?”
“Can I call you back?” said Abby, relieved for this excuse not to give out Thorn’s number. “Someone’s at the door.”
Without quite knowing why, she didn’t want to have lunch with Valerie Patten. Once they hung up, Abby would not have to think about that plane ride, or the embarrassing way she’d hidden Valerie’s letter, or about the letter itself. She would throw it away and that would be that.
“Sure, Abby. I promise not to be napping, next time,” she laughed.
“Goodbye, Valerie,” Abby said.
“Bye, hon.”
Abby waited until she heard the pleasant click, breaking their connection.
Later that evening, Abby went shopping with Thom for his Christmas Eve party. Connie and Warren were coming, and Pace had said he would try to make it; he’d been invited to several other parties. Thom had also asked some of Carter’s friends, thinking they might be lonely or in need of cheering up, but he kept assuring Abby it would be a small gathering.
“I specifically said ‘for cocktails,’ so everyone’s clear we won’t be feeding them,” Thom said, as they drove toward Lenox Square. “Otherwise, some people will stay all night. We’ll just have a couple of drinks, exchange a few gifts, and when the others leave we’ll go out for dinner somewhere with Pace and Connie and Warren. Do you think most places are open on Christmas Eve? I can’t even remember what I did last year.”
Their shopping would have taken less time but for Thorn’s habit of chatting with salespeople, clerks at the registers, grim-faced shoppers waiting in line. Abby had her old sense of pride in accompanying her handsome, likable brother, seeing how people glowed and smiled as they basked in his casual but friendly attention. Old men, teenage girls, small children—all responded to his smiling banter about the Christmas traffic, the mall crowds, the high prices of everything, ordinary conversation he managed to personalize just enough to make anyone feel singled out, pleased by the unexpected approach of this tall, brightly talkative, but easygoing man. At such moments Abby would see her brother from a stranger’s perspective—his genial, angular face with its deep-set, amused blue eyes; his glossy dark hair, wet-looking as though he’d just stepped from the shower; his lanky, long-limbed build; his rumpled clothes. Handsome in a friendly, anonymous way, Thom Sadler was someone you might not notice until you felt the pleasurable warmth of his grinning, gently flattering conversation. Abby remembered that in high school one of Thorn’s girlfriends said laughingly he was “comfortable as an old shoe,” a remark that had gratified Abby though the girl hadn’t intended a compliment, exactly; underneath the laughter, there had been an edge to her voice. Now as they walked through the mall Abby supposed anyone to whom Thom had spoken must assume she was Thorn’s girlfriend, and once or twice Abby suppressed the odd impulse to slip her arm through her brother’s. After several weeks of living together, he treated her with the same careful attentiveness he’d given to girls he dated in high school.
After they’d left the mall and were driving back down Peachtree through the gathering dusk, Abby felt mildly elated without quite knowing why. Earlier that day, she’d felt troubled at the prospect of not seeing Philip until after Christmas; he’d insisted he had no plans, and no intention of making any. Christmas was just another day to him, he’d said, and he would probably use the holiday to get some reading done, or catch a new movie. She shouldn’t worry about him, he said, giving her a peck on the cheek; Abby should just have fun with her brother and not think about anything else. She’d felt hurt by this remark, but now she decided the advice was easy enough to follow, since during this shopping expedition with Thom she hadn’t, in fact, given her lover a moment’s thought. Or her mother. Or the job she had resigned so impulsively, abandoning her colleagues and her students, those bewildered needy adolescent girls who all adored “Miss Sadler.” This morning she’d indulged in some guilty moping at the idea of her and Thom enjoying their party while Philip sat home alone, reading; and of her and Thom sipping champagne with their friends while their mother endured a dull holiday dinner at Millicent’s town house. But, Abby thought, didn’t everyone choose how they would spend the holiday? Lucille had made her choice, hadn’t she?
Abby stared ahead at the lovely skyline of midtown Atlanta, shrouded this evening in a kind of foggy glamour, the faraway glimmering of the downtown hotels overshadowed by these soaring, stately midtown buildings: the elegant conelike structures built in the booming ‘80s by Coca Cola and BellSouth, glowing eerily in their complex swathings of multicolored wreaths and winking “stars”; the splendid obelisk of the IBM building with its crisp geometric outline of red and green lights. These opulent towers thrust skyward into the mist, basking in the homage-like illumination cast up from the hunched, shoulder-like masses of the smaller buildings below.
Abby remembered driving along the interstate with Lucille the night before they’d left for Philadelphia, those few but impossibly long years ago, and how tears had pricked her eyes at the thought Home. This is home. Lucille had been chatting busily, her clipped northern vowels returned in self-conscious force; she was reverting into the Yankee she’d always claimed to be. All through Thom and Abby’s childhood, their mother had made the tired joke that Atlanta “might be a nice city, once they get it finished.” How energetically she’d decried the never-ending construction, the traffic detours, the startling blend of preserved antebellum glamour and spit-polished urban sheen you could witness along any single block of Peachtree Road. Yes, her mother allowed, Philadelphia might be gritty and glowering; you may not want to dip your little toe into the Schuylkill River, or drive into Center City after dark, or venture into South Philly at any time; but she’d insisted fervently those last few days how she couldn’t wait to get back.
Abby, sitting next to her in the car, or across from her during dinner, or in the den watching television at night, had not made so much as a grimace of protest, even as her heart throbbed with longing that Thom might call. Surely, at the last minute, he would call and apologize and coax his mother into staying here, for they could be a family only if they lived here together, now that Daddy was gone they had to stay here, didn’t they…? These sentimental notions had evaporated as the final slowed days of their Atlanta lives ticked past. Against Abby’s will her heart had hardened. Even her mind had hardened, for she had stopped thinking about what was happening, what she was allowing to happen. And so these past few years Abby, too, had chosen how to spend her holidays, and the long stretches in between, inhabiting her life as a kind of ideal tenant, she thought, someone who made no noise or trouble, left no impression on her surroundings. Yes, the mere tenant of her own life, and she forced these words through her mind slowly, as if to insist she would not forget them, not stopping to consider that if she was the tenant, then who was the owner? Self-pitying tears no longer threatened her now, but her sense of home, no less of herself, seemed as foggy and unformed as that skyline glimmering in the distance.
The next evening as they prepared for the party, she felt a moment’s shock, but no real surprise, when she blurted to Thom that she’d wanted to stay here, move back here. When the doorbell rang, precluding his reply—except for the deft instinctive curl of his arm around her waist as they turned to greet Connie and the others—she knew that beneath the surface hilarity of the evening ahead she and her brother would be acclimating to a new togetherness, an alliance she had sealed with as unilateral a stroke as Thorn’s when he’d seceded from the Sadlers’ broken, bewildered family union in the aftermath of their father’s death. During the party Thom met her eyes every few minutes with a sad-looking smile, or an amused-looking frown, as the others sipped and munched and chattered all around them. Somehow Abby couldn’t bear these moments and had to glance away.
Yet Thom and Abby—as Connie declared after they’d all drunk several glasses of champagne, and had resettled in the living room awaiting the seven o’clock guests—were the “perfect hosts,” and despite his many invitations to other parties he could think of nowhere else he’d rather be. He added, “You really are. Now, I’m sure Abby did most of the work, as I’ve never seen this place so tidy and so nicely decorated for Christmas, but you two make a great team. I wish you’d just chuck it all and move here, Abby”—this was a moment when she’d glanced at Thom, then had to look away—“since it’s silly for poor Thom to be all alone. And now that Carter’s gone…”
“It really is better to live with someone,” Warren said, with his genial smile. Like the others, Warren looked his best tonight, his bushy swatch of reddish-brown hair elaborately combed and parted, his face shiny as a choirboy’s; even his pleated navy corduroys and wool shirt of red and green plaid looked boyish, like a set of school clothes from which the tags had just been removed. “People who live with someone tend to have a longer life expectancy, you know, than—”
“Come on, Warren, no psychobabble tonight,” Connie said teasingly, but then he leaned across and pecked him on the cheek. “This is what we get for inviting a shrink,” Connie told the others, rolling his eyes.
“I need one, goddamn it!” said Pace, with his affable bark of a laugh. Tonight even Pace, who normally wore what he called his “uniform”—flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, a pair of ancient, battered moccasins with thick white socks—wore a dress shirt. His mop of dark brown hair—even more copious than Warren’s—was neatly brushed; his sharp-boned face with its rimless spectacles looked alert and curious, like the straight-A prep school student he’d once been. Now his chin jutted forward as he exclaimed with a pained grin, “The traffic is driving me crazy! Usually, I get out of town during Christmas, but this year it slipped up on me.”
“I’m glad you stayed,” Abby said, touching his forearm. She understood why everyone liked Pace so well. Despite his incessant complaining, and his overloud voice, and her own disinclination to admire a man in his forties who lived off his “investments,” there was a kindliness to Pace, for all his world-weary bravado, that tugged at her sympathy. Often he snarled half-jokingly about his “goddamn stockbroker” and his “goddamn lawyers” and his “goddamn accountant, stealing me blind,” and about the service he’d hired for his housework, whose employees didn’t “clean worth a damn,” but even during these tirades his sky-blue eyes, slightly enlarged by his thick glasses, seemed unsullied and expectant, like a small boy’s.
Abby thought: Were all gay men essentially childlike, even in middle age?
“I’m sure your other friends are glad, too,” she told Pace. “I heard you’ve gotten plenty of invitations.”
Pace shrugged. “Social obligations. It’s a vicious circle—I give a big party, then I get invited to three-dozen smaller parties. And they feed me dinner, some of them, so then I feel I’ve got to reciprocate, so I throw another big party. I think I’ll move to New York, so I won’t have to see any people!”
He laughed and took another swallow of champagne. As his head tilted back, his glasses became small octagons of reflected light.
“Where were you invited tonight?” Connie demanded of Pace. “I was asked to five other parties, but I’m staying right here!”
“Your parties are terrific, Pace,” Warren said quickly. “I wish you had one every week.”
“Then I’d be one of your patients, for sure!” Pace shouted.
Around seven-thirty, shortly after Thorn’s remark that after two flutes of champagne Abby resembled a “corrupt sorority girl,” the other guests began to arrive, each exclaiming over the tree ornaments, the “almost obscene”—as Pace had observed—heaps of brightly wrapped packages underneath it, and the fireplace mantel decorated with holly and candles and braided strands of red and silver tinsel. During the next hour Thorn’s living room became a scene of constant commotion—shrill talk and laughter, exclamations of pleasure over small gifts (mostly bottles of wine) passed from hand to hand, and over the trays of pungent-smelling party food Thom kept bringing out from the kitchen. New arrivals called to friends across the room, waving excitedly and shouting “Happy holidays!” as, at shin level, the black-and-red blurs of Mitzi and Chloe raced among the guests, begging shamelessly for bits of food and racing off again, barking hysterically with each new ring of the doorbell.
Abby had intended to help Thom, but Connie kept hold of her elbow and involved her in conversation with the new arrivals, most of whom she remembered from the gathering after Carter died. But she couldn’t recall their names or think of much to say, so she simply smiled and shook her head and took another swallow of champagne. Thom carried the food trays back and forth, and managed to dart into the room every few minutes and refill his guests’ glasses; Abby had stopped after her third, her head reeling. She attributed Connie’s almost obnoxious ebullience to the champagne, too, though she’d seen him consume large quantities of alcohol before without becoming quite so agitated. There had been a degree of frankness—and occasional vulgarity, too—to his incessant chattering tonight, including several jokes about Monica Lewinsky and Clinton (she gathered that Connie despised Clinton) that Abby thought especially jejune. Locker-room jokes, sniggering double entendres lacking in Connie’s usual wit and playfulness. She found herself watching him and wondering if something might be wrong. (Nor did Warren seem quite himself: he stayed close to Connie but had gotten quiet, his forehead creased in what might have been chagrin, or simple embarrassment.) Connie’s aqua-blue eyes glittered as he spoke, his attention flitting from one person to another; his talk seemed oddly random, disconnected.
During a rare moment of quiet, when the others were focused on some picture-taking next to the Christmas tree, Abby leaned to Connie and whispered, smiling, “Are you feeling OK? You seem—I don’t know, a little jittery?”
His eyelids fluttered, taking in this unexpected query, but he gave his theatrical smile, his cheeks flushing, and gestured broadly.
“It’s the company, sweetheart, and the occasion! I always get hyped up at Christmas time…”
His attention veered off, as though Abby had not spoken.
By eight o’clock, more than a dozen guests had arrived, and the talk had gotten louder, the bursts of laughter more raucous. Although Connie downed each glass of champagne swiftly, Abby noticed the others drank at the same accelerated pace, leaving her to imagine, with a schoolteacher’s anxiety, their cars weaving off drunkenly into the night. She and Connie found themselves talking to Alex and his lover, the two physicians they’d seen during lunch at Agnes & Muriel’s, whom Connie had disliked so intensely, but tonight he joked and bantered happily with both of them, though allowing himself a perfunctory, offhand bit of malice.
“I thought you two would be jetting off to Rio or something!” he cried, greeting them both with air kisses.
The four of them chatted for a while, though Alex’s cell phone kept beeping—“the hospital, sorry!”—and Alex, frowning, sank into the sofa and gave medical advice in his authoritative mutter, as if oblivious to the chatter and hilarity swirling around him.
Again the doorbell rang and they greeted the new arrivals, a lesbian couple with whom Connie seemed to have a close but teasing friendship.
“Patsy!” he cried, hugging a heavyset woman with short-cropped gray hair and a round, pudgy face that reminded Abby of Roger Ebert’s. “Patsy, it’s you! I should have known—I thought someone had just opened a can of tuna fish in here!”
Receiving Connie’s embrace, Patsy said, “Shut up, you overdressed old queen,” winking to Abby over Connie’s shoulder.
Resuming his usual, elaborate courtesy, Connie presented his friends to Abby. Patsy’s lover, whom Connie introduced as “Miriam—isn’t she sweet? And isn’t that the sweetest name?”—was a petite woman in a tight-fitting black leather jacket and skirt and matching knee-high boots. Despite her boyish haircut (virtually identical to Patsy’s, though Miriam’s darker, finer hair was more sleekly combed, and severely parted on one side) and what appeared to be flowery tendrils of a tattoo between her small breasts, Miriam was pretty in a waif-like, big-eyed way. After Connie and Abby had chatted with the two women, Connie grasped Abby’s shoulders, turned her sideways and introduced her to another couple, a handsome blond man in his forties with a receding hairline and hawk-like nose, and his much younger, exotic-looking lover.
“James is an architect, and Reginald is an interior designer, though I keep telling him he could make lots more money as a model.”
Reginald had slipped an arm around James’s waist: “Thanks, but we enjoy working together,” he said. “James has taught me so much.”
“And I’ll bet you’ve taught him a thing or two,” Connie said, with a mischievous leer.
Abby, exchanging smiles with Reginald, saw that he was indeed spectacularly good-looking: close-cropped dark hair, enormous fawn-like brown eyes with impossibly long lashes, a strong nose and square-cut jaw that saved him from effeminacy. His skin, a glimmering-pale sienna, made Abby wonder…but what was the point in wondering, she thought, chastising herself. He was a beautiful young man, easily the most attractive man at this party: wondering about his “background” was a vestige of her Southern upbringing she hoped she had outgrown.
Connie, keeping hold of Abby’s arm, chatted amiably with James and Reginald for a while, until the inevitable moment when Connie’s eye wandered, and he called across the room to someone else.
Another hour had passed, and by now Abby supposed they wouldn’t be going out to dinner, after all, though Thom had stopped refilling his guests’ champagne flutes, and had asked here and there if anyone wanted coffee.
“Coffee!” Connie protested, wrinkling his nose. “What kind of scrooge are you, Thom Sadler!”
Thom gave a slight smile as he turned away. “I’m your host, not your enabler,” he said.
Warren gave a melancholy laugh. “Thank you!” he called out.
Connie said, pettishly, “If you can’t get blitzed on Christmas, when can you?”
At last came the moment she’d been awaiting. Alex and Randy deposited their empty flutes on the coffee table and approached Abby, glancing at their watches.
“Got to be going—”
“Had a lovely time—”
They’d spoken at the same moment; they laughed.
“Wait a second, I’ll get Thom,” Abby said. “He’ll want to say goodbye.”
As if the gesture were contagious, the other guests glanced at their watches, too, and there were histrionic sighs and exclamations as if they’d all lost track of time, and a few moments later Thom and Abby stood by the door as people filed out, buttoning jackets and drawing on gloves, offering last hugs and pleasantries and “Happy holidays!” while those staying behind shouted “Happy holidays!” in reply. When the door had closed and Abby, shivering, turned back into the room, she saw Pace and Warren slumped on the sofa, each with a dachshund on his lap, while Connie hovered near the fireplace with his coffee mug, looking displeased.
“What’s the deal with ‘Happy holidays’?” he said, with mocking emphasis on the phrase. “Why don’t people say ‘Merry Christmas’ any more? Nobody at this party was Jewish, were they?”
Thom shrugged. “Might as well play it safe,” he said. He glanced around with the successful host’s smile of satisfaction; the room looked as if a friendly cyclone had blown through. “I think everybody had a good time, don’t you?”
“Yes, but next time let’s chat about your guest list beforehand,” Connie said, with his mischievous grin. “I mean, honestly… Alex and Randy?”
“I thought I should,” Thom said. “Alex called to invite Abby and me to their big New Year’s Eve party. He specifically mentioned Abby, which I thought was nice, since he only met her that once.”
“You’re going, then?” Pace said, morosely. “That’s good, there’ll be somebody there I want to see.”
Connie’s face had blanched; he and Warren exchanged a sudden, communicative look. It took Abby a moment to understand that Connie and Warren hadn’t been invited to the party. But Connie recovered within seconds.
“I wouldn’t attend one of their pretentious soirees if you begged me,” he said. “I’ll curtsy for the queen, but not those queens.”
“I guess James and Reginald won’t be going, either,” Warren said, his head tilted sideways as Chloe licked his earlobe.
Abby said, “Why not?”
Connie finished his coffee in a long swallow and set the cup on the mantel. “A few weeks ago,” he said, “there was a little get-together at Craig Black’s to start planning the Human Rights Campaign Fund dinner next spring. When someone mentioned James’s name, I heard Alex bend to Randy and sort of stage-whisper, ‘Oh, God. Don’t tell me James and his little slave boy are on this committee.’”
Thom stared. “Alex said that? Really?”
“In case you were wondering, Abby,” Connie said, fixing her with his intent, glassy stare, “Reginald is a mulatto. But isn’t he gorgeous? I’ve never been with a black man, but I’d gladly spend a few hours with him.”
“I doubt the reverse would be true,” Warren said tartly.
Everyone laughed, Connie most of all. “Touché!” he cried. “But then everybody is crazy about Reginald. My friend Keith goes to his gym and says he’s hung. Of course, that’s no surprise, since his daddy’s the black one. And I heard—”
Thom and Abby had stayed by the door, but now Thom stepped forward quickly, waving one hand as though dispelling imaginary smoke. “Connie, please don’t pollute the atmosphere,” he said.
Abby saw from the clench of her brother’s jaw that he wasn’t quite joking.
Connie rolled his eyes; he bowed magisterially to Thom. “My apologies, O Enlightened One,” he said, but he gave Abby an anxious look. “You’ll have to excuse me, sugar. I’m just an old Southern queen. I’m really not prejudiced. My cleaning lady is black, you know, and I just love her to death.”
“Yes,” Warren said, looking chagrined. “She gets all of Connie’s best castoffs.”
“Well, she does,” Connie protested. “What’s wrong with that? She has two sons in high school, and they’re thrilled to have my clothes. Some of the stuff has been worn only once or twice. You know, Abby, I could sell my things in consignment shops, but Ruby is one of those good churchgoing types. Her sons don’t belong to gangs or anything. Those are the ones you want to reward, you know?”
“Can we please change the subject?” Thom said.
Connie waited by the fireplace, his arms crossed.
“All right, on one condition,” he said, in a mock-demanding tone. “That we all have one more glass of champagne, before we toddle off to dinner.”
Pace glanced at his watch. “Dinner? My God, I forgot about dinner!”
“It’s only 10:15,” Warren said. “We could go to Mick’s or something.”
“Or Terra Cotta,” Thom said. “Their crowd should have died down by now.”
“What about Tiburon Grille?” Connie said. “They’ve redecorated the place, you know, and the food is fabu.”
Abby felt how swiftly the atmosphere had changed: again they were a close group of friends, deciding where to have dinner on Christmas Eve.
Pace said, “Has anybody tried Luna Si lately? It used to be so pretentious, but I heard they have a new chef.”
“Veto, veto!” Connie cried. “Luna Si is the worst restaurant in Atlanta, bar none! I’d rather eat at Pittypat’s Porch than that place!”
They laughed. It had been years since Abby had even thought of Pittypat’s Porch. Noted for its bad food and worse service, it was one of Atlanta’s premier tourist traps, a Southern cliché jammed nightly with camera-toting vacationers from Kansas and Wisconsin.
“I vote with Thom,” Pace said. “I’ve never had a bad meal at Terra Cotta.”
“Fine with me,” said Warren. “Abby?”
“Four gay men agreeing on the same restaurant for dinner,” Thom said, smiling. “Amazing.”
Abby helped Thom carry plates and glasses to the kitchen, and she was about to hurry back to her room for her coat when the doorbell rang.
Thom glanced at his watch. “Who could that be?”
Abby said, “Did one of your friends leave something behind?”
“Quick, look between the sofa cushions,” Connie said gleefully. “Maybe Alex left his cell phone. We’ll pretend we can’t find it, then later we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Warren said, smiling, “Maybe it’s Santa Claus!”
But when Thom opened the front door, he and the other four—Abby most of all—stood gaping.
On Thorn’s cement stoop waited a petite, dark-haired woman with mascara-stained tears running down her face. She wore a stylish red wool suit, but the jacket hung askew; she held a wet-looking, much-shredded kleenex in her fist; her face wore an expression of adult embarrassment mixed with childlike uncertainty, almost an orphan’s look of pleading.
“Hel-hello,” she began. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but—” Her words gave way to a new bout of tears, which she tried to daub away with the overused tissue.
Abby stepped forward. She put her arm around the woman’s shoulders and coaxed her inside. Thom closed the door and joined his three staring friends while Abby, hugging the woman’s narrow, trembling shoulders, made the introduction.
“Everybody, I want you to meet a friend of mine,” she said. “This is Valerie Patten.”
In this abrupt way the course of their evening changed: instead of leaving for Terra Cotta, Thom insisted on making them an impromptu dinner—and a delicious dinner it was—of fruit and cheese and sourdough rolls, along with the plentiful leftover hors d’oeuvres reheated in the oven. Valerie Patten insisted she could not eat, but she did accept a glass of champagne, from which she took ladylike sips as she told them about the ruination of her Christmas Eve.
After apologizing repeatedly for foisting her troubles on them—apologies they all dismissed energetically, especially Connie, who seemed rapturously fascinated by Valerie Patten from the first moment he saw her—Valerie haltingly told them about her revived marriage to her fourth husband, Marty, and how they’d planned a “special” evening together: a sumptuous dinner at the Hedgerose Heights Inn, followed by dancing at the Biltmore Room, and then a night at the Ritz-Carlton, where Marty had booked the twenty-second-floor Presidential Suite with its breathtaking view of the city. Around six o’clock she’d returned home from some last-minute shopping; Marty was not there, so she’d gone ahead and put on the new dress she’d bought at Parisian and had gone into the living room to slip under the tree yet another gift she’d bought him, a pair of cuff links from Tiffany’s. Then she’d wandered into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine and sipped at that while she waited. By then, it was past seven and she’d begun to worry: their dinner reservation was for eight. She’d started on her second glass of wine before she found the envelope.
Here Valerie succumbed to a fresh assault of tears, while the others made supportive, sympathetic noises. On the sofa, Abby and Warren sat on either side of Valerie (Warren was in his element, and Abby noticed how several times he had touched her hand and asked skillful, gently leading questions), while Thom and Connie listened intently, perched on dining room chairs pulled close to the sofa. Only Pace looked uncomfortable, cracking his knuckles in an armchair near the fireplace. But he listened, too, as Valerie told them what Marty’s note had said: that he’d gone to the airport, that he was flying home to Minneapolis to spend Christmas with his mother, that he couldn’t explain why but he felt their relationship could not work out, after all. He would call in a few days, he said. Unless she decided to leave for Philadelphia, which he would certainly understand. He hoped she didn’t hate him, he said. Goodbye.
“That was the last word. Goodbye,” Valerie sobbed. “Then just his name—not even ‘Love.’ Just…’Marty.’”
Abby wanted to criticize Marty’s behavior, but this wasn’t the moment for that; and Warren, who urged Valerie back to talking about how she felt, rather than about what Marty had done, seemed to confirm her instinct. As Valerie glanced around at the others, as if seeing them as individuals for the first time, she gave a tentative smile.
“Thank you all for being so nice,” she said, huskily. “I just didn’t know what to do, or who to call. Abby may have told you guys that we met on the plane, and then we talked on the phone the other day…. Anyway, Marty has this newfangled caller ID, and the name ‘Thomas J. Sadler’ had appeared on the screen, and that had stuck in my head so I looked up the address in the phone book. I should have called first, I know, but—but I guess I thought if I showed up in person, it would be harder to turn me away!”
She gave a feeble laugh, and Abby smiled back at her. “We don’t mind. Really.”
“When I got here and saw it was a complex, my heart sank,” Valerie said. “Then I looked on the mailboxes, and sure enough, there was your brother’s name and the unit number. So here I am!”
Connie said, brightly, “And we’re glad you are! We really are!”
He was drinking champagne, too, and sat with a paper plate perched on his knees, munching on cheese and blackened chicken while Valerie talked. Mitzi and Chloe were having a field day, making the rounds and begging piteously for bits of food that Connie and the others, absorbed in Valerie’s story, absently handed them.
When Valerie stopped talking, it was Warren again who took the lead, telling her they’d just been having an informal get-together and repeating that she was perfectly welcome.
Then another idea seemed to dawn on Thom; he looked at Abby, then back at Valerie.
“There’s a place called Blake’s not far from here,” he said. “But it’s a gay bar. I mean, I wasn’t sure if you realized—”
Connie laughed. “Valerie is upset, Thom honey, but she isn’t brain-dead.”
Yet Valerie, her smile faltering, did seem perplexed. She took another—and slower—look around the room. “I guess I didn’t… I mean, it doesn’t matter in the least to… The lovely man who does my hair, you know… What I mean is…”
Warren laughed gently, patting her hand. “We know what you mean.”
“You’ll get used to them,” Abby said. “They’re basically harmless.”
“But wait, I want to hear more about Valerie!” Connie said. Again his eyes had that glassy sheen. “How about one more glass of champagne before we leave? What do you all think? Valerie?”
There was a polite silence while the others gazed at their new guest.
Again Valerie smiled, more broadly this time, her hand fluttering to her throat as if she’d been paid an extravagant compliment.
“Why, thank you,” she said. “Another glass of champagne would be lovely.”